Quote

I would like people to live in the present with eternity in mind. If there is, in fact, going to be rapture one day, in which we leave everything behind, shouldn't that loosen our grip on our material possessions right now?

I'm not a dispensationalist - I don't believe in the Rapture. I think it's an unbiblical doctrine, and in North American Christianity, at least, it is the teaching that is the root of much of our subculturalism.

We're growing up together, the human race. And we've discovered a lot of things that we didn't know. We're finding our way. Instead of thinking about doomsday all the time, think about how beautiful the world is. We're all together, and together we're getting wiser.

We seem to have lost our contact with the primordial: the idea of - call it divine revelation as opposed to something that's learned by the human intellect - something that, if you lay yourself completely open, and you just open your heart completely, something will actually come into it.

At the end of our lives, we step across the threshold or death and enter into a new and better world. I believe that. It's just that simple.

I err on the side of a kind of optimistic agnostic sense that there's something that put us all here - some energy or something that we are not in a position to understand.

It's not the events of our lives that shape us, but our beliefs as to what those events mean.

We are, perhaps, uniquely among the earth's creatures, the worrying animal. We worry away our lives, fearing the future, discontent with the present, unable to take in the idea of dying, unable to sit still.